Kinetic Publishing Showcase Reveals Five New Indie Games Coming in 2027 and 2028

Kinetic Games spent years building trust with one game. On August 12, its new publishing arm tried to spend that trust on five games at once, and none of them look like Phasmophobia.

Kinetic Publishing held its first-ever showcase, revealing the debut lineup for the label it spun out of Phasmophobia's success earlier this year. The five games land across 2027 and 2028, and they range from a tense sci-fi paperwork simulator to a cozy wizard life sim, with a Metroidvania set inside a giant snail and a new Sam Barlow horror project rounding things out. Given that Kinetic made its name scaring people in a haunted house, the sheer range on display says a lot about what the studio wants this label to be.

A Publisher Built to Fund Other People's Weird Ideas

Kinetic Publishing was formed by Kinetic Games earlier this year, using the momentum from Phasmophobia, which has now sold more than 27 million copies. The pitch to developers is fairly simple: funding, production support, and marketing muscle, without Kinetic taking creative control away from the studios actually making the games.

That approach shows in how scattered this first slate is. A publisher chasing another horror hit would have picked five horror games. Kinetic picked a life sim, a romance-adventure, a Metroidvania, a job simulator, and one horror game, and even that horror game barely resembles Phasmophobia.

Contact Protocol Makes Border Control Feel Like a Death Sentence

The showcase opened with Contact Protocol, and it might be the strangest pitch of the five. Players work as a security officer aboard the starship Pale Horse, checking incoming ships against company records as the vessel travels toward one of Jupiter's largest moons.

The job sounds almost boring on paper. Compare a ship's paperwork, decide if it is telling the truth, wave it through or turn it away. Except getting that call wrong can mean choosing whether to let a suspicious vessel pass or destroy it before it becomes a threat, and the game gradually makes that information harder to parse as runs go on. It is the kind of game where a misread form can end with someone getting spaced, which is a weirdly specific horror to build an entire game around.

What makes these encounters tense is that you never have a full picture. When a ship approaches, you're cross-checking its data against solar maps, your own notes, company policy, and whatever you picked up from previous encounters. Something usually won't line up, and the crew on the other end will often have an explanation that sounds reasonable enough. You can push for more details, vouch for yourself, or just make the call and move on. The problem is that the other ship is sizing you up too, and every extra minute you spend fact-checking is a minute a potentially hostile vessel spends closing the distance.

That pressure is by design. The developers have said Contact Protocol is built on the idea that people make worse decisions under cognitive load, so the game piles on information right as it's asking you to make a moral call, letting the busywork of verification collide with the harder question of what you should actually do. And there's no clean "deny entry" button waiting for you if you decide you don't trust a ship. Your only real option is to fire a torpedo, and the game only tells you afterward how many people were on board.

Contact Protocol arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC in Spring 2027, with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Crescent County Pairs Witchcraft With Motorbrooms and Romance

Crescent County sits at the opposite end of the showcase from Contact Protocol. Developed by Electric Saint under creative director and illustrator Anna Hollinrake, it is an open-world coming-of-age game set on an island where witchcraft and technology exist side by side.

Players move to the island and start over: taking jobs, meeting neighbors, and possibly falling for one of them along the way. The motorbroom is the mechanical hook, letting players race across the island delivering packages, but the bigger draw is probably the painterly art style and a story built around community, found family, and queer identity. Kinetic has said the project grew out of Hollinrake's own move to the Isle of Wight, which explains why the game seems more interested in letting you settle into a place than pushing you toward the next objective marker.

The motorbroom racing isn't built around traditional competition either. There are no time trials or leaderboards to chase. Developer Electric Saint describes it more as a social activity, something closer to roller skating and roller derby culture than a racing game. You can still get competitive with your friends if that's the mood, but the point is hanging out and having fun before jumping back into whatever else the island has going on. The racing itself doesn't lose its edge for it, with drifting, boosts, gliding, and big jumps keeping the high-speed side intact.

That same idea shapes the quests. Creative director Anna Hollinrake points to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as a big influence on writing quests that veer away from where players expect them to go. A simple delivery job can turn into its own strange little story, like being asked to drop off a parcel of records only for the recipient to change their mind and tell you to toss them in a pond instead. Romance runs alongside all of it rather than sitting in its own separate lane, something Hollinrake credits to her love of Dragon Age.

The setting comes from a personal place too. Hollinrake has said her own move to the Isle of Wight for her first job in the games industry became a major inspiration for Crescent County. Getting to know a new place, building memories around its different corners, and slowly starting to feel at home there all fed into the game's core idea, just filtered through a witch-tech world of magical realism and motorbroom racing.

Crescent County is set for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC in Summer 2027, also with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Shellbound Builds a Metroidvania Inside a Living Snail

Then the showcase got genuinely odd. Shellbound is a Metroidvania set on the back of a giant living snail, where players control a parasite exploring a world built out of the creature's own organs and biology.

It could have been a gimmick, but the concept runs through the mechanics rather than sitting on top of them. The parasite can take over enemies and NPCs, borrowing their abilities for movement, combat, and traversal, and those stolen powers open up new areas and bosses. That means finding the right host matters as much as beating it, which is a fun twist on the usual Metroidvania ability-gate formula. Pocket Tactics also reports that repeatedly beating certain enemies causes them to evolve into tougher versions of themselves, so familiar fights do not necessarily stay easy.

Shellbound breaks from the usual Metroidvania formula by tying progression so closely to the creatures you fight. As a parasite, you can infest and take over enemies, using their abilities for combat, platforming, exploration, and puzzles. That means your toolkit isn't limited to the usual double-jumps and dashes, and the developers say the system can let players sidestep traditional ability gating entirely, opening the door to sequence breaking and alternate routes through the world.

Enemy evolution makes that system even more dynamic. Kill enough of a given enemy type and the species can evolve into a stronger, or entirely different, form. The developers have given one example where an enemy that starts out crawling can eventually evolve into a flying creature, handing the player a brand-new ability once they take control of it. That can open up new areas, new attacks, and new puzzle solutions depending on what a given enemy has turned into.

The world itself changes too. Shellbound's biomes shift through both story progression and the player's own actions. The developers point to the Mucus Garden as an example, a lush, vibrant jungle that can eventually turn dead and barren, with its layout and accessible areas changing right along with its appearance. That gives backtracking an actual purpose. Returning to a biome you've already cleared can mean different enemies, a different environment, and new routes entirely, rather than just retracing the same path.

Shellbound is scheduled for Summer 2028 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.

Aether Wizard Life Throws Everything at a Cozy RPG

Aether Wizard Life, from Vonder Games, takes the cozy life sim template and stuffs a lot more into it than usual. Players take on the role of an apprentice mage in the haunted town of Starfall, where wizards have been mysteriously disappearing.

Solving that mystery is only part of the loop. The game mixes farming, town building, dungeon exploration, platforming, action-RPG combat, running a shop, caring for creatures, and dating, letting players decide day to day whether they want to grow magical crops, fight monsters, or just chat with the locals. It is an ambitious combination for a cozy game, and the Ghibli-inspired art style Kinetic showed off suggests the studio is putting real weight behind the atmosphere carrying all those systems.

Aether Wizard Life runs on a daily rhythm that moves between cozy life sim and adventure. Each morning, players pick a quest before heading out to explore dungeons, gather ingredients, brew potions, visit the tavern, meet other wizards, or work on their own castle. That castle is more than a home base too. Players can collect blueprints, rebuild its ruins with magic, design the surrounding farm, and decide where to place things like fields and stables for their magical creatures.

The magic extends into the characters and the everyday routine as well. Each wizard has their own spirits tied to a particular magical specialty, and players can gather dungeon ingredients and turn them into potions to sell at the town's potion shop. Some of those potions tie into customers' actual problems, including a few who want help with their love lives. Down at the tavern, a wizard named Orville turns monster ingredients into bizarre dishes, which gives players one more reason to keep exploring just to see what he cooks up next.

The developers point to Studio Ghibli as a major influence, especially Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and My Neighbor Totoro, alongside Stardew Valley, Dave the Diver, and Spiritfarer. The team has said Spiritfarer's focus on relationships with NPCs was something they specifically wanted to capture. After years spent refining the visual direction, they settled on a hand-drawn style meant to give Aether Wizard Life a look of its own.

Aether Wizard Life launches on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC in Autumn 2028, with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Precognition Is Sam Barlow's New Horror Game, Made With Brandon Cronenberg

The last reveal was the biggest one. Kinetic Publishing closed the showcase with Precognition, a new sci-fi horror game from Sam Barlow, the creator of Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality, previously known under the working title Project C. Barlow is developing it alongside filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg.

Precognition follows Diana, a woman who sees visions of events that have not happened yet, after an experimental brain implant. Players dig through those visions for details, but there is a catch built right into the premise: remembering something from a future vision can change what actually happens when that future arrives. Knowing too much becomes its own danger.

That fits Barlow's track record of nonlinear, footage-driven storytelling, where players piece together fragments of filmed material into their own understanding of events. Cronenberg, known for Possessor and Infinity Pool, brings his own history with unsettling sci-fi and psychological horror, which lines up neatly with a story about distorted perception and the cost of tampering with time. Kinetic says the game will reward players who pay close attention to small details, which tracks given Barlow's past work.

What makes Precognition interesting is that its visions aren't just glimpses of what's coming. From Diana's perspective, the future plays out almost like a set of memories she hasn't lived through yet. Players can zero in on specific moments inside those visions and commit them to memory, but doing so immediately changes the future they're looking at. So the act of investigating what might happen can directly reshape what actually does happen, which puts player choice and experimentation at the center of the whole experience.

That builds on the nonlinear storytelling Sam Barlow has been experimenting with since Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality. Instead of a straightforward sequence of events, players have to piece together what they're seeing on their own, maybe keeping a notebook nearby while cross-examining clips for connections or details they missed the first time. Barlow says Precognition pushes that sense of freedom even further, to the point where different players could come away with genuinely different readings of the story.

Brandon Cronenberg's involvement goes beyond a name on the box. The filmmaker, known for Antiviral, Possessor, and Infinity Pool, worked with Barlow and the team on the story and wrote some of the game's scenes himself. The team sought him out specifically because they wanted Precognition to be a genuinely pure sci-fi horror game, and Cronenberg's own interest in subjective horror made the fit an easy one.

Precognition is planned for Spring 2028 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC, developed by Half Mermaid Productions.

What Kinetic's First Slate Says About the Label

None of these five games are close to launching. The first two arrive in 2027, and the remaining three are all currently pointed at 2028, which gives every studio involved plenty of runway to actually finish what they showed. For a debut showcase, that is a fine problem to have.

What stands out is how little overlap there is between the games. Contact Protocol runs on pressure and bad decisions. Crescent County is about slowing down and putting roots somewhere. Shellbound turns body horror into a traversal puzzle. Aether Wizard Life tries to be five games at once and mostly gets away with it. Precognition closes things out by handing Sam Barlow's investigative style to a filmmaker who specializes in making skin crawl.